ART REVIEW : ‘ANNUALE’: RECOGNITION, NOT COHERENCE, IS POINT

If you think of “Annuale,” at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, as a service to the local art community, it’s easier to understand why all this disparate, often unformed work is under one roof. Each year a distinguished curator comes in from afar to select the most deserving from a plethora of applicants. Results then go on view at LACE, generally offering a mixture of works by emerging artists and some who are relatively established.

The artists get recognition, the public gets to see unfamiliar work and writers get to complain about how difficult it is to say something coherent about something that is not.

As usual, this year’s “Annuale” (through Oct. 11) is easier to support in principle than in person. The project is a community service, a fundamental part of the screening process that puts art up for scrutiny and ultimately determines what will be remembered as germane to our time. But most of the works at LACE look so half-baked that they declare their makers’ desire to be part of the scene more clearly than their point of view.

Dana Friis-Hansen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology served as judge this year, narrowing more than 300 contenders to 25 finalists and finally selecting static works by 13 artists plus three videotapes. The guest curator says the show focuses on art expressing “a concern with personal, social and political issues over purely formal aesthetic experimentation,” but the range is still so wide as to make connections seem tenuous at best.

Oh well, coherence is not the point. The introduction of new work is. Thus we find Nancy Evans turning out willfully clumsy paintings of eyes and ears that can be interpreted as cosmic landscapes, Connie Hatch commenting on men watching women (and photographers as voyeurs) in a photo-and-text piece called “The Desublimation of Romance” and Liz Larner creating cultures of such things as orchids, buttermilk, pennies and colored agar that react to each other over time.

Using thousands of copper BBs, Tim Alexander builds a high-rise that grows from geometric order to a Chinese-flavored organic form, while John Rand draws immaculate, industrial capsules that sometimes explode. David Bunn implies political commentary in “Under the Nose of Stalin With Afghanistan,” a two-part, medal-like piece that places a portrait of the former Soviet leader above a black silhouette of Afghanistan.

Hilja Keading’s plywood box of a room with amplified music invites us to step onto a rotating stage and become entertainers under a spotlight. But the urge to perform is stifled by the stark, claustrophobic theater that might be an interrogation chamber. There’s a good, genuinely disturbing idea lurking in this piece, but it doesn’t really express itself. Instead of experiencing the tension, we absorb the concept of it--in two seconds flat.

Another installation, a black-and-white room that’s jam-packed with consumer society junk, takes the opposite tack. Here we’re so busy examining the visual overload of appliances, books, clothing and bric-a-brac compiled by Lisa Weger and Jim Reva that we barely get around to questioning what it means. The two artists performed in the set on opening night, but during the rest of the show the tableau stands as a monument to domesticity gone berserk.

It’s a hard act to flank, as we see in adjacent displays of Thaddeus Strode’s gently worried paintings and Pattrick Slattery’s vaguely suggestive combinations of words and figurative images.

Across the room, Ernest Scott holds his own in a tiny wall piece depicting a shadowy woman in a movie theater and a cookie-cutter man looming large outside. Inch for inch, it’s the most evocative piece in the show.

Michael Monahan’s shredded, reassembled posters also stand out, as a commentary on the ways images are blurred, altered and merged through reproduction and media overkill. Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” becomes an out-of-focus “Starrier Night” and local artist Robbie Conal’s posters of “Men With No Lips” and “Women With Teeth” run together in “Lips-teeth.”

The video portion of “Annuale”--73 minutes worth--turns out to be the show’s highlight. No docent with a sense of humor should miss Susan Schwartz Braig’s satire of docent tours and museum hype in “C.O.M.A” as she tours the fictional (and hilariously familiar) County of Orange Museum of Art. We enter through a lineup of sports trophies, leading to a “Monument to the White-Collar Worker” that parodies Robert Graham’s “Olympic Gateway,” and things go down from there.

Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s engaging “Kappa,” starring artist Mike Kelley, explores the wildly improbable myth of a Japanese god of fresh water. Kelley becomes this saucer-topped free spirit who romps through sexual fantasies as he plays out the endearing and fearsome sides of the little-known deity.

Even more improbable is the notion that a veritable legion of local women believe in the goddess of Los Angeles (who comes from Spanish lore) and see her all around. But here they are--poets, healers, artists, priestesses--proclaiming the faith in “Our Lady of L.A.,” a videotape by Kathleen Forrest, Cheri Gaulke and Sue Maberry. If you thought the ‘60s were over, you haven’t checked out life on this wavelength.